This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.

Featured Post

Monday, November 26, 2012

Bani Walid Revisited

It has been a month since pro-Libyan government forces took the pro-Qaddafi stronghold of Bani Walid by force of arms. This slight return to armed struggle in the Libyan Revolution has spun alternative narratives about what really happened there and what it means about the Libyan Revolution.

Not without reason, the different narratives on what happened in Bani Walid coincided with a split in the Left over support for the Libyan Revolution that emerged strongly as soon as NATO intervened on the side of the people Qaddafi was trying to kill. This split in the Left has only ripened and sharpened with time, and has become especially acute as Assad's mass murder in Syria drags on.

The same forces on the Left that supported Qaddafi in Libya, support Assad in Syria, and for much the same reasons. Now the anti-interventionists that opposed the no-fly zone over first Libya and now Syria, have Syria, with maybe 40,000 dead and counting and an estimated 700,000 refugees by the end of the year, as an example of what happens when their policy rules the day.

Under these circumstances, they are under great pressure to show that in hindsight, intervention in Libya was a bad thing. Their current narrative on Syria requires them to demonstrate that Libya is a complete mess now, much worst off than under Qaddafi, worst or at least as bad as what is happening now in the non-interventionist success story - Syria.

Once they predicted NATO boots on the ground would follow NATO air support. They painted the Libyan Revolution as a US orchestrated grab for oil and the National Transitional Council as a CIA organized puppet government. They said we've been through this movie before. They said it was just like Iraq.

Well, it didn't work out like that and now they are at great pains to ignore reality and create an alternative one in which things worked out the way they dreamed they would.

They really haven't had much to work with, but the final rooting out of Qaddafi loyalists, a task that ultimately needed to be done through armed struggle, gave them and excellent opportunity to show the revolutionaries in the role of the aggressor and the Qaddafi remnants as the underdogs. Hence, their narrative around Bani Walid has taken on a particular significance.

In any case, i thought it would be useful to revisit Bani Walid a month after the controversial events to see what hindsight can tell us. This is the most recent report on Bani Walid that I have found, it is from Magharebia and published in English at AllAfrica.com:

Libya: Bani Walid Returns to Normal

By Essam Mohamed, 20 November 2012
Tripoli  Security improvements in Bani Walid reassure citizens that it is now safe to resume their normal activities.

Less than one month ago, the Libyan desert town of Bani Wali looked like a war zone. It is now coming back to life.

"Every day is better than the previous one and steadily improving. The security committee controls all the intersections of the city, which is protected by the national army and the security forces," Local Governance Minister Mohamed al-Hrari told Deutsche Welle.

Troops loyal to the Libyan government captured the flashpoint city on October 24th. Hundreds of loyalist fighters reportedly entered the town and hoisted the national flag atop abandoned buildings.

In the month since then, several grocery stores have opened, as well as fruit and vegetable markets. Cars circulate in the streets.

Some 500 homes were burned in the city during recent clashes between Libyan government-controlled forces and former Kadhafi loyalists.

"We have tasked a committee drawn from four engineering offices to fully survey damaged homes and dwellings in the city. Victims will have their rents covered for three months," Dr. al-Hrari said.

The army is in control of the city and the population is now less worried, according to Mouin Chernam, Director of the Political Section of the United Nations Mission in Libya. He also noted that displaced people were returning to schools and hospitals were becoming fully functional. More...

A 7 November article in the Libya Herald put the death toll from the attack at 30, most of them being civilians:

Bani Walid: complacency from the authorities, resignation from the population

By Mathieu Galtier.
The government says that Bani Walid will be back to a normal in a week or so, with the local authorities taking charge. However, locals are fatalistic; they know it will take months to erase the scars of the siege and the attack of their city.

General Hussein Abdullah, the chief of the temporary military council in Bani Walid, is proud to list all the achievements since the armys successful attack on Bani Walid.

The security is good, eighty percent of electricity and water supplies are back, schools will re-open in three or four days, the hospital has been replenished with drugs and equipment and the roads are largely open.

After the military operation, on 24 October, the government created three committees for Defence, Public Services and the Return of Refugees. These committees report to General Abdullah.

I hope to leave Bani Walid in less than one week he told Libya Herald. The local police will take over when we leave.

Abderhaman El Ahmari had just returned to Bani Walid to fulfil his own mission : to rebuild his familys new life and home. On 25 October, he discovered that his two-storey house was burnt.

I used to live in this house with my wife and my five children. They stole my gold worth LD 180.000, which I kept in a strongbox. I dont know who has done this, but they as Muslims, they showed a lack of respect. I still believe the situation will improve in the country but not now, maybe after this government, he told Libya Herald sadly. At the moment, he and his family are living with relatives in Bani Walid.

The smell of burning, the black smoke-stained walls and the sound of glass cracking underfoot are the same in Al-Adjs family house. Back from Taruna, on 27 October, the nine members of the family saw their home was totally destroyed.

My mother cried when she saw it burnt. Now, all of us are living in the same room, which is independent from the house Hussain, one of the sons, explained. In the corridor, one message is written on the dust of a mirror : Allahu Akbar (God is great).

As far as Libya Herald could check, many of the destroyed homes were in the Darah area of the town. But in a community as tight as the 80,000 Warfallah in Bani Walid, it seems almost everyone knows someone who has been hit with disaster. Libya Herald noted dozens of shops had been looted and many others are still closed. The normal daily life is coming back slowly [Inside Bani Walid].

Nevertheless, Bani Walid is not like the largely-deserted town of Tawagha.
...
Most of the 25,000 Bani Walid inhabitants who, according to the International Red Cross, fled before the final attack, have now returned from Taruna or Tripoli. More...

By Ghaith Shennib
BANI WALID, Libya | Sun Nov 4, 2012 4:41am EST
Hundreds of cars filled with families took advantage of the quiet lull after the Muslim holiday of Eid to return to their homes after a siege around the former Gaddafi stronghold of Bani Walid was lifted.

A week earlier, a similar stream of cars carrying the same people headed the other way. Families loaded with belongings fled attacks from militiamen aligned with the government who said they were wresting control of a city that remained anti-revolution.

Fighters captured the town on October 24 amid chaotic, vengeful scenes that demonstrated the weakness of the new government's hold over militiamen who owe it allegiance but largely do as they please. More...

There is no doubt that the vengence taken out on Bani Walid by some of the government authorized militias was excessive and criminal, even if most of it was against buildings after the people had fled. Many homes were destroyed. As reported in the Daily Star of Lebanon in an article titled "Libyan town wracked by political score settling":

"What does burning down homes have to do with searching for criminals of the former regime?"asked Saad, a father of five, after appraising the damage and concluding there was no alternative but to pitch a tent in the garden.

But it is also apparent that reconstruction efforts began as soon as the fighting stopped, as exampled by this 31 October report of an electricity maintenance team heading to Bani Walid.

The Alternate Universe

The picture of Bani Walid presented by these reports is one of the real world but there is another one from an alternate universe that is being presented by various friends of the defeated regime. I have already noted the spurious charges of white phosphorous and nerve gas made by RT, the mouthpiece formerly known as Russia Today, in my last diary on Bani Walid.

In a more recent article on their website, The Final Call, the Nation of Islam, the African-American group, takes this even further, comparing the siege of Bani Walid to the killing fields of Cambodia:

NATOs henchmen are attacking their own people with bombs and chemical weapons, injuring and killing scores of civilians. Women, children and old people lie maimed or dismembered on the side of the roads, many of them buried in the rubble.

Residents tell stories of bombs filled with burning toxic gases and white phosphorous raining down from missiles. Scorched victims of the constant shelling are proof of the sinister nature of the Islamist militias and the fascist government forces which have been ordered to use all necessary means to deal with Bani Walid. Where is the international community condemnation? Where is Amnesty International? And where is NATO? Why has the Security Council not called an emergency session to address this atrocity? Where is the humanitarian intervention? Russia finally put forward a draft statement to the UN Security Council calling for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing crisisa lukewarm response to a killing fields scenario and even this was blocked by the U.S. This is the freedom sanctioned by NATO in Libyaaccept the mark of the beast or die.
...
the siege of Libya and Bani Walid, which can easily be compared to the killing fields of Cambodia, is unfolding before their eyes. There is no question that the Islamist militias that have surrounded Bani Walid are certainly on a par with the Khmer Rouge.

It is certainly no accident that all those howling about mass murder in Bani Walid are supporters of the Qaddafi regime and coincidently, supporters of the Assad regime in Syria. In fact I think we may find that their efforts at propaganda around Bani Walid are actually more related to current events in Syria than they are to events in Libya.

The whole article is shamelessly justifying and glorifying the death and destruction inflicted on the residents of Bani Walid, home to the largest tribe in Libya.

Rebels from Misrata cut off water, food and medicine to Bani Walid for four weeks as they indiscriminately shelled the city. After entering Bani Walid Rebel forces undertook a policy of shelling, burning and looting homes, businesses and public buildings including hospitals. The city is now in complete and utter ruins with many residents unable to return. Its not hard to find evidence for this devastation if you had looked beyond your strange obsession with Russia Today.

He then goes on to list two [1], [2], YouTube videos from RT source GRN Live, before he goes on to trash the Libyan people's efforts with another set of convenient, if unrelated, charges:

Racism was prevalent in Libya particularly in the East of the country. In Dec 2000 anti-black pogroms which started in Benghazi led to the deaths of 100 migrant workers. The whole NATO-backed rebellion in Libya was characterised by a relentless racist campaign of ethnic cleansing, lynching, torture and incarceration of black Libyans and migrant workers which began within days of the rebellion and continues today. Misrata was home to a particularly heinous brigade who were self-titled The Brigade for Purging Black Skin, Slaves Misrata forces ethnically cleansed the entire town of Tawergha of its 30,000 inhabitants.

Finally, he ends my making his preference for Libya under Qaddafi clear:

Libya has transformed from a stable country with by far the highest standard of living in Africa (despite decades of crippling sanctions) into a failed state ravaged by insecurity, death squads and human rights abuses on an unprecedented scale.

Since this gratuitous and distasteful charge that the whole anti-Qaddafi opposition is racists was, and often is, thrown in for good measure, I will address it first. I have already spoken to his points in greater detail elsewhere, I would refer the reader especially to Racism in Libya and Helter-Skelter: Qaddafi's African Adventure for more on the history of racism in Libya and Qaddafi's contributions to it.

The commenter is absolutely correct to point out that racism was prevalent in Libya after more than 30 years of Mummar Gaddafi's rule. but he is wrong to imply that it is a disease of Eastern Libya and I believe he has his dates wrong because the racist pogrom against blacks in Libya in 2000 took place in September not December and involved the whole country AFAIK.

This piece post 12 October 2000 in The Economist gives us a picture of the times:

PLANELOADS of bodies, dead and alive, flew back to West Africa from Tripoli this week, after Libyas worst outbreak of anti-foreigner violence since the expulsion of Italians and Jews in Muammar Qaddafis coup in 1969. Survivors told of pogroms.

Emeka Nwanko, a 26-year-old Nigerian welder, was one of hundreds of thousands of black victims of the Libyan mob. He fled as gangs trashed his workshop. His friend was blinded, as Libyan gangs wielding machetes roamed the African townships. Bodies were hacked and dumped on motorways. A Chadian diplomat was lynched and Nigers embassy put to the torch. Some Nigerians attacked their own embassy after it refused refuge to nationals without proper papersthe vast majority.

Libyans sheltering Africans were warned that their homes would be next. Some of Libyas indigenous 1m black citizens were mistaken for migrants, and dragged from taxis. In parts of Benghazi, blacks were barred from public transport and hospitals. Pitched battles erupted in Zawiya, a town near Tripoli that is ringed with migrant shantytowns. Diplomats said that at least 150 people were killed, 16 of them Libyans. The all-powerful security forces intervened by shooting into the air.

Later, when the regime itself was the target, these same forces would not hesitate at shooting into the crowds.

African migrants, unfairly blamed for the disaster, were detained en masse. They once numbered over 1m but diplomats say that they have now mostly disappeared from the streets, and are in hiding or in camps pending expulsion. Over the past fortnight, hundreds of thousands of black migrants have been herded into trucks and buses, driven in convoy towards the border with Niger and Chad, 1,600km (1,000 miles) south of Tripoli, and dumped in the desert.

This was Mummar Qaddafi's policy, his government organized the rounding up, transport and dumping of hundreds of thousands of African immigrants in the desert.

Migrants from countries without land links to Libya, including 5,000 Nigerians and nearly the same number of Ghanaians, are being airlifted out. Hundreds more are languishing in three scrubland camps ringing Tripoli airport waiting for flights. There is no medical care for the black Africans, many of whom have broken limbs or stab wounds.

This article also gives us more on background:

Anti-black violence had been simmering for months, fired by an economic crisis. Colonel Qaddafi heads Africas richest state in terms of income per person. This year oil will earn him $11 billion. But Libyans, feeding their families on monthly salaries of $170, see the money squandered on foreign adventures, the latest of which is the colonels pan-Africa policy. As billions flowed out in aid, and visa-less migrants flowed in, Libyans feared they were being turned into a minority in their own land. Church attendance soared in this Muslim state. So did crime, drugs, prostitution and reports of AIDS.

A history of racism fanned the flames. Libyans were slave-trading until the 1930s and, under Italian colonial rule, they saw themselves as Mediterranean, calling Africans chocalatinos. Black-bashing has become a popular afternoon sport for Libyas unemployed youths. The rumour that a Nigerian had raped a Libyan girl in Zawiya was enough to spark a spree of ethnic cleansing. More...

And all this happened more than a dozen years ago, under Colonel Mummar Qaddafi's leadership.

Some "leftists" use historic Libyan racism as a weapon against the revolution, I see the revolution as a weapon against racism #Libya#Feb17
 Clay Claiborne (@clayclai) September 10, 2011

So racism is not a new problem in Libya. It did not arise with the movement to overthrow Qaddafi, nor will it be vanquished overnight. I aim my writings on this subject at the Libyan revolutionaries with an eye to contributing towards a solution.

Not so these anti-interventionists turned counter-revolutionaries. They see in Libyan racism, a chance to attack the revolution so they go to great lengths to paint a picture of racism whenever they can. For example, it is an unfortunate feature of Arabic that the word for Black[the race] and the word for slave are the same, so the name of this brigade, as translated by someone looking to make a point, might be misleading.

And while it is true that almost everyone was run out of Tawergha, a town of 30,000 that played a particularly cruel role in the months long bloody siege of Misrata, I don't think it fair to call it ethnic cleansing or to attribute the targeting of people from Tawergha to racism and not revenge. Black townships generally have not been targeted and Tawergha itself was not ethnically cleansed, everyone was run out, Black and Arabic alike.

Racism and the Libyan Revolution

In historic-political terms, what the Libyans are doing is carrying forward the bourgeois democratic revolution against a tribal based regime with many feudal remnants and a "socialist" facade. US history has clearly shown that victory over racism is no prerequisite for carrying forward the democratic revolution. In fact, just the opposite is the case.

So those that seek to condemn and disavow the democratic processes taking place right now in post-Qaddafi Libya, in the name of fighting racism, are really missing the point.

Like far too many on the Left, I believe that this commentator is one who fell for Qaddafi's "socialist" and "anti-imperialist" facade many years ago. Then when the Arab Spring came to Libya, the Colonel started to do an Assad on the protesters and NATO uncharacteristically came to their aid, these same leftists, so use to opposing whatever NATO does, doubled-down on their support for Qaddafi and opposed the popular uprising against his dictatorship,

They became "anti-interventionists" with regards to the Libyan conflict and we can see in Syria, for the past year, what they wished was still happening to the Libyan people.

But since they failed in their bid to keep the beloved Brother Leader in power, they have turned their fire on every effort by the people to create a new Libya.

They like to portray the developing revolutionary government as a "failed state" or something similar, so when the newly elected government finally moved decisively to crush the armed pro-Qaddafi counter-revolutionaries in Bani Walid, they screamed bloody murder.

What happened in Bani Walid?

I believe there was necessary violence used in Bani Walid and there were excesses. I also believe that only reaction is served by applying hyperbole and exaggeration, not to mention outright fabrication, to this unfortunate situation in an attempt to tar the whole Libyan Revolution.

In his final paragraph, this commenter indicates that he would probably also endorse the view of the Nation of Islam that what took place in Bani Walid in October was as bad as the Khmer Rouge "killing fields" of Cambodia because he says that Libya today is "ravaged by insecurity, death squads and human rights abuses on an unprecedented scale."

The odd thing to me is that this commentator thinks himself a Marxist and since that is the case, let us look at these questions from the perspective of Marxism.

State & Revolution

While Mummar Qaddafi called himself "Brother Leader", said he had no formal state power and claimed his Libya Jamahiriya was some new kind of "green" socialism, the reality was that the economic system was capitalism and the political system was much more of a throwback to an earlier epoch than an advanced example for the future.

The system he developed relied heavily on ancient tribal rivalries and loyalties that parceled out favors and power along family lines. It had much more in common with the feudal dictatorships of the pre-capitalist world everywhere than with the bourgeois republics native to capitalism. Qaddafi ruled like a king and his family lived like royalty. The proof is that he was grooming his son to succeed him.

Therefore the principal task of the current revolution in Libya is the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution. This must be done before they can move forward to the next stage. For Libya, the road to real socialism flows through the establishment of a democratic republic.

This has been the task of the "Arab Spring" revolutions generally; completing these long stalled national bourgeois democratic revolutions.

There are those on the Left that have poo-pooed these revolutions because they haven't had socialism as their immediate goal, but that has not been their mission.

These have not been proletariat revolutions in the Marxists sense, even though it has principally been the workers of the MENA [Middle East\North Africa] countries that have pushed them forward. The demands for democracy and an end to these family dictatorships are still demands of the bourgeois democratic revolution. The demand for economic justice pushes the envelope.

Speaking generally, in these countries the bourgeois democratic revolutions that began with the end of formal colonialist after WWII were stalled by imperialist suppression so that state organization never moved over completely to some form of democratic republic but instead ossified for 20, 30, 40 years as a tribal and family based holdover from feudalism, formally with kings in Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and defacto with Assad & son, Mubarak & son, Ben Ali & son, and Qaddafi & son in others.

Capitalism develops the best with the modern bourgeois democratic state but the fact that these MENA countries were throwing off colonial oppression rather late, in a period of socialist revolution, and the fact that the masses continued to face heavy imperialist exploitation, made the extension of anything like full democratic rights to the masses rather risky.

So, using tribal, religious and ethnic differences to divide and conquer, a variety of neo-feudal regimes consolidated their power in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq and Syria. The monarchies already in place in Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia made a few cosmetic democratic concessions. And that is how MENA rolled -- until recently.

"Remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society"wrote the great Russian Marxist V.I. Lenin in his profound work on the nature of government under capitalism, socialism and communism, The State and Revolution.

All of these MENA governments had proven themselves completely corrupt and incapable of change. They were incapable of meeting the mass demand for democracy and that made the demand for democracy revolutionary. In every case, it necessarily morphed into a demand for an end to the old regime.

This is what the Arab Spring became in every country.

But the people didn't face the same situation in every country.

Now, looking at the first three countries to succeed in casting out a dictator in North Africa, we can see that while Ben Ali was forced out in Tunisia and Mubarak was forced out in Egypt, and without a lot of violence, much of the machinery of state remained intact. Most significantly, the security forces of the old regime have survived largely intact. That makes these very dubious revolutions so far, if indeed, they have earned that title at all. The people of those countries still have a lot of work to do before they can claim their liberation from the old regimes.

In Egypt, Morsi is reaping the world-wind for attempting to do just that.

Matters are quite different in Libya where the regime's army was completely defeated on the field of battle, abet with NATO air support, and all of the existing state institutions had to be completely destroyed or abandoned. In point of fact, the Qaddafi way of doing things left them little to work with in any case. Everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

The thoroughgoing nature of the revolution in Libya should make it of special interest to Marxist-Leninists, it is such a shame to see so many turning their backs to it. Of all the uprisings of the Arab Spring, only the one in Libya meets two of the major requirements for the liberation of the oppressed as Lenin described them in State & Revolution:

if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and alienating itself more and more from it", it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this alienation. (my emphasis) As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution.

The year since the fall of the Qaddafi regime has been a most exciting and interesting one in Libya. To defeat Qaddafi's organs of state violence, it was necessary for the Libyan people to form what Lenin would have called "the population organizing itself as an armed force" or "a self-acting armed organization of the population." This necessarily led to a post-overthrow landscape of hundreds of armed groups all over the country that mostly cooperated but occasionally competed with tragic consequences.

The National Transitional Council [NTC] was also necessarily an body cobbled together on the fly. It could never be entirely representative, democratic or open in its functions. It was designed to bring the Libyan Revolution out of the shadows and in that it succeeded.

In the past year, the war was won and civil institutions started to be reconstituted. The NTC created the High National Election Commission [HNEC] which, over a period of months, organized national elections in which 1.7 million Libyans elected a 200 member General National Congress.

This election was a particularly interesting exercise in democracy because at every step, every feature had to be created anew, Qaddafi allowed no open political life, it all had to be created anew. Now political parties and publications of all sort abound but there are no petrified parties like the Republicans or Democrats to hog the limelight, in fact 60% of the positions were only open to independents. And there weren't a bunch of foreign NGOs or advisors telling them how to run the show. This was a truly Libyan election resulting in a democratically elected government.

Another critical part of this revolution has been the struggle to consolidate all armed forces into one national force controlled by the elected government and to extend that control to every part of Libya. The conflict over Bani Walid must be viewed in that larger context.

And the revolutionary struggle to form a new government in Libya continues unabated. With the GNC in place and most of the key government posts filled, the country is preparing to write a new constitution and that is sparking lively discussion. Monday 26 November 2012 Shabab Libya [Libyan Youth Movement] is carrying the following piece:

The Libyan publics role in drafting the constitution

Source- George Grant for the Libya Herald via the Saudi Gazette
NEW YORK CITY  Over the past week, the General National Congress (GNC) has turned to the question of who should draft the new constitution. The question is whether drafters should be selected as originally planned in the August 2011 Constitutional Declaration or its amendment immediately prior to the 7 July elections. The debate raises the question of the role the public should play in drafting the constitution.

At the core of modern democracy is the idea of popular sovereignty. It is generally thought that governments are more just and legitimate when the law emanates from the people by their election of lawmakers. Yet democracy extends beyond voting law-creators into power. The people can and should participate in law creation itself when possible and advisable. Especially in the creation of the fundamental law of the country: the constitution.

Substantively, public participation in constitution-making will likely yield a constitution that better ensures rights and protections for the people and will be more reflective and inclusive of those people. More...

Too few on the Left have been carefully following these developments in Libya, some have even long ago written off the Libyan revolutionaries as tools of western imperialism and NATO and refuse to look back. Some feel that they can't come to any meaningful results simply because they lack socialist leadership, but that is not their fault. Consider how little respect the Left has given their heroic efforts so far, and how little guidance.

Remember, the Paris commune also lacked the leadership of a vanguard party.

And while what they are building in Libya is not yet socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat, possibly it is the next best thing. Consider Lenin's assessment of the significance of the establishment of the democratic republic, again from State & Revolution:

Engels realized here in a particularly striking form the fundamental idea which runs through all of Marx's works, namely, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic, without in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding, and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of those masses by the proletariat.

Libya remains a country with a small population that is rich in oil revenues. That means it is possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses now and the current struggle for democracy in Libya can easily and organically lead to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.